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Help talk:Tree page
November 2010 and subsequent months I've noticed some fairly blank tree pages among the things that have gone wrong since Dick Eastman kindly sent us a few score of new contributors on Remembrance Day 2010. I've not bothered to try to fix most of the apparent errors. The other day I looked at one of Thurstan's new creations, a tree page, and was surprised to see that it had most of what I would expect. Then I looked at what has been one of our best advertisements, Charlemagne/tree, and saw nothing but Charlemagne and some empty boxes and lines. So Thurstan hadn't unlocked the secret entirely. But he said he had been re-saving sensor pages and tree pages to get some of them to show more. So I had another look at Charlemagne/tree about an hour ago and did some re-saving as suggested, and made progress. The great man's parents appeared. I turned attention to his father Pepin and repeated the process: Pepin's tree had been similarly empty but now resumed showing Pepin's parents! Back to Charlemagne, re-save his sensor page and his tree, and his father's parents appeared in his tree. Same with his mother eventually, but with less visual excitement because they don't have pictures. There must be a better way. But hey, this is far better than the totally manual methods we had to use two years ago! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:24, January 17, 2011 (UTC) I see why the tree pages went blank. When the patch to SMW was applied, and were updated to remove the calls, as part of fixing the display (around about 1 Dec 2010). This would have forced an update to all the /sensor pages (since they invoke these templates) just when the "sensor" logic was not working because of the patch. Now that the patch has been withdrawn, we need to re-save the /sensor pages, in top-down (oldest first) order to recreate the property:Ancestors used by the tree pages. Thurstan 22:07, January 17, 2011 (UTC) :I fear that that is not the whole answer either. I've just worked my way up Charlemagne's male line of ancestry for about seven generations, removing some question-marks, then re-saved sensor pages in order all the way down. One of the fellows produced quite a good tree page, with half a dozen ancestors. But CM's grandfather's tree page still goes no further than parents. I wonder whether the question-mark-removals, which would have produced working redirects, need to have their redirects bypassed on the children's pages. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:34, January 18, 2011 (UTC) ::And now you have updated the template , so all the sensor pages which use it will be being updated again (not necessarily in the order you want). Thurstan 02:47, January 18, 2011 (UTC) :::With respect, I doubt whether that will happen in a hurry. (If it did, I'd want to be tweaking that template several times a day so that sensor pages would get updated more often. No matter what the order, a mere 40 runs would trickle down 40 generations.) It is my impression that an altered template affects its flock of including pages only when each is re-edited. Maybe it's time for me to re-read the relevant pages of the MediaWiki or SMW websites? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:28, January 18, 2011 (UTC) :::Sorry, I am probably wrong: when I check wikipedia:Help:Job queue it talks about "Updating links tables when a template changes": I had assumed that it would also do any other consequent changes (such as SMW updates), but you are probably right that it doesn't do that. I suppose the tree pages form a test case. Thurstan 04:50, January 18, 2011 (UTC) Thurstan is correct. All sensor pages were wiped. They will be renewed eventually, but if you want results now, you'd have to re-save every single one in the right order. Note that this does not guarantee success because sensor pages have a low priority on the server. Sometimes you need to re-save a couple of times, or come back a few hours later. rtol 06:24, January 18, 2011 (UTC) :Please explain "eventually" (in the first line of that explanation). This week, this month, or just one at random every few days or hours until 2020? Surely someone is in charge of whatever bot has been doing the necessary work for all of the major trickle-down re-saves that have got us a long way in previous months and seem to need repeating? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:12, January 23, 2011 (UTC) Note that it's not just the trees that were wiped. Ancestors from ... is gone, inbreeding is gone, and so on. rtol 06:24, January 18, 2011 (UTC) :Inbreeding seems to be working again, unless it's just making up numbers. Robin Patterson 03:18, February 12, 2011 (UTC) All boxes empty Trouble again? Same problem or new problem? See Maria Ligia Vasiliu (1934)/tree. All boxes empty. I've created and saved and re-saved her sensor page and re-saved the tree page and the article (in alternating order, not the above order). (Along the way I noticed that the "dates" part of the form was doing silly things to the year, but that's another issue.) — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:12, January 23, 2011 (UTC) :Well, a few days ago we had another change to SMW: I suspect this is another new version, rather than a patch. Things that I have noticed so far that are now broken: #The property:Ancestors and property:Descendants calculations on the /sensor page are just giving an error message # is giving errors on the placename displays #having a lot of entries under property:Sources generates an error message (unhelpfully non-specific!) about a 1000 character limit #the form is giving us a full "date-chooser" for year fields. I suspect that the "type" of the "year" properties will have to be changed to number to fix this (it is this change that makes me think that we have had a full "upgrade") :Thurstan 21:57, January 23, 2011 (UTC) Semantic Forms 2.0.8 :: tells me me we now have Semantic Forms (Version 2.0.8) (r32516) ::That looks vaguely familiar, as if I had recently seen an announcement on the SMW mailing list that that version was a new release. An earlier forum here mentioned the number of the upgrade that caused us lots of trouble in March 2010; I think it was version 1.x. We may have to rewrite a bit. With any luck, the result may be an improvement. ::( I repeat. Can anyone see "facts" as we used to see them at the bottom of sensor (and sometimes article) pages? ) ::— Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:31, January 25, 2011 (UTC) :::I can, because I went back to "MonoBook", so that I would have the "facts" and the "refresh" button. The "facts" are in an HTML div with class="smwfact", so maybe we can tweak the stylesheets to show them. Thurstan 02:53, January 25, 2011 (UTC) I have changed the type for the "year" properies, so (4) is fixed: the form seems to work okay now for dates. Thurstan 04:01, January 25, 2011 (UTC) Source Code Here's some of the source code for David William Donald Cameron' tree page. Maybe someone can see what's wrong. Main tree ancestors February 2011 Interim "patch". Discussion at Forum:Templates update, where alternative tables and their templates are compared and discussed. Robin Patterson (Talk to me) 08:14, February 27, 2011 (UTC)